Monday, February 24, 2020

Mass-produced propaganda -- a Cuban example

An "author" named Admin posted over 1,000
articles in seven languages in two weeks.

Earlier this month, Google sent me several notifications for an article entitled "The Internet Is Widely Accessible in Cuba. Why Is the US Insisting It Isn’t?" I checked it out and found that Reese Erlich had posted it on Truthout.org, a left-leaning Web site, on February 12. On the 13th, Cabasi.com published a shortened version of the article and Salon.com published the original version on the 17th. These were all in English and both Salon and Cubasi credited Truthout.

I also received notification of an article entitled "Internet es ampliamente accesible en Cuba. ¿Por qué Estados Unidos insiste en que no lo es?" that was published February 13 at DiarioDeLatinos.com.

It turns out that DiarioDeLatinos also published English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian versions of the same article on the 13th. The seven versions of the article were all written by the same author, Admin, with a little help from Google Translate, which rendered "New York Times" as "New York Instances" in the first paragraph. Admin is prolific -- he or she had posted 1,072 articles on DiarioDeLatinos.com as of the morning of February 18th and DiarioDeLatinos.com was registered on February 4th. The registrant organization is Domains By Proxy, LLC, which is located at the GoDaddy Headquarters building in Scottsdale, Arizona:

Private domain registration is reminiscent of banks facilitating money laundering. I wonder what else Domains By Proxy is hiding.

Finally, I took a look at what the censors at Cubasi deleted when they edited the original article. They cut mention of tools like the Signal encrypted messaging app and VPNs, the fact that Cubans can download El Nuevo Herald, and Cuba’s blocking of Web sites. They also deleted references to dissidents like Yoani Sanchez or Ladies in White and admissions that only 38 percent of Cubans are connected to the web compared to 70 percent for all of Latin America, 3G wireless is being installed in Cuba while much of the world is switching over to 5G, Cuba lacks convertible currency, Cubans don’t have the bandwidth to stream video and El Paquete is “by far” the most popular technology for Cubans.

This was not Cuba's first foray into online propaganda. In 2013, Eliécer Ávila described Operation Truth in which 1,000 university students were writing social media posts favoring the government and working as "trolls," disrupting discussion and attacking those who question the government and last month Granma posted a propaganda/conspiracy article about US subversion.

I wonder how much Internet propaganda the Cuban government sponsored between 2013 and 2020 and I worry about the fact that any government could do the same.

1 comment:

I am a Cuban who has been living in the US for several years who still have relatives and Friends living in the island. When I left my country the internet access was strictly limited to certain workers in the state own Enterprises or governmental agencies. Even those workers where forbidden to access certain websites and blogs where Cuban independent journalist posted their articles. The heads of the Departments in charge of controlling and supervising the computer network we're usually retired members of the Armed Forces or the ministry of the interior who are all of them members of the communist.Party. Eventually, the Cuban regime decided to open access to Internet to grassroot Cubans but that access is restricted for two main reasons: First, those websites that post analysis, or information that the Cuban regime dislike are off limits for the Cubans in the island and, second, the exorbitant prices the Cuban has to pay to be connected to the internet prevent many of them to do so. However, if one checks the Social networks will find material, mostly videos, the Cho accrued reality of the everyday life for the Cubans and and that the dissemination of anti-regime facts has prompted it the government to enact legislation to stop that trend. The Cuban people is far from having the same internet access the rest of the people in the region have and trying to mask. that reality is playing in favor of the longest-living dictatorship of the western Hemisphere